Energizer Park Named Finalist in ULI Americas Awards for Excellence Competition
Date Posted: May 28, 2025
Posted In: Organizations, Projects,
Energizer Park has been named as a finalist for the 2025 ULI Americas Awards for Excellence. There are 18 finalists and four special mention projects. Ten projects are selected as winners.
ULI began the Awards for Excellence program in 1979 to recognize truly superior development efforts in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors. Winning projects represent the highest standards of achievement in the development industry—standards that ULI members deem worthy of attainment in their professional endeavors.
The Awards for Excellence recognize the full development process of a project, not just its architecture or design—although these elements play an important role.
The Awards recognize both development projects and programs. Among projects, the Awards recognize a wide variety of product types, including office, residential, retail, industrial, hotel, mixed use, planned community, open space, and more. Programs are initiatives, processes, or policies that guide or enhance development.
A jury of ULI members chooses finalists and winners. Members of the jury are leaders who represent a broad geographic diversity and many areas of real estate and land use expertise, including finance, planning, development, public affairs, design, and professional services, among others.
Site visits were made to finalist projects in May. The winners will be announced June 30th.
Five Pillars of Design
Energizer Park is part of a 31-acre sports district in downtown St. Louis. The design transformed a former freeway off-ramp and surface parking lots into an active destination. Anchored by a 22,423-seat soccer stadium, the development includes a training facility, three practice fields, a team store, team headquarters, parking garage and community gathering spaces. It annually hosts 1 million visits for Major League Soccer or local events.
St. Louis CITY SC was awarded an MLS expansion team in 2019. Its ownership group, led by the Taylor family of Enterprise Mobility, recognized an opportunity to design more than a stadium. Instead, they created a new district to bring investment and activity to Downtown West.
Five strategic pillars guided the HOK and Snow Kreilich Architects design:
- Connection: Integrating with the neighborhood’s fabric,
- Mobility: Efficiently moving people using infrastructure and technology,
- Sport: Creating a distinct home-field advantage,
- Training: Centralizing team headquarters and practice facilities,
- Experience: Bringing 24/7/365 vitality to the neighborhood through inspiring architecture and public spaces.
With open concourses, street-level activation and a commitment to sustainability, Energizer Park demonstrates how sports districts can generate economic and social value. The project has driven nearly $1 billion in area development while creating new opportunities for local businesses and residents.
Energizer Park and the surrounding district is a source of civic pride and a beacon for downtown St. Louis. The 22,423-seat stadium resets the current paradigm of large inward-facing structures, offering more porous, connected and appropriately scaled architecture. The pitch and service level are located below the street to minimize height. Concourses around the seating bowl are open to the neighborhood and provide varied views in and out of the park, letting fans feel like they are part of the larger cityscape.
Energizer Park’s main concourse is level with the west end of the Gateway Mall, allowing the stadium to maintain a lower scale within the city. Its form is based on a simple flat portico created by a flat canopy and tall slender columns that frame the upper seating bowl. This simple yet striking canopy creates a sense of enclosure that focuses attention on the field while keeping the stadium connected to the urban core, establishing a definitive sense of place.
The training facility, practice fields, ground-level retail, a team store and flexible public gathering spaces bring constant energy to the site and enhance Energizer Park’s engagement with the urban fabric. Community plazas transform the district before and after games. The plazas also are used for outside events, ensuring that Energizer Park remains a vibrant part of the city even when there are no matches being played.
Largest Urban Sports Campus
City SC is the first MLS club to consolidate its stadium, training facility, practice fields, and team headquarters into one location, establishing the largest urban sports campus in the U.S. and redefining integrated sports development.
Energizer Park was built on the former Mill Creek Valley neighborhood, a predominantly Black neighborhood demolished in the 1950s for urban renewal. This displaced 20,000 residents and razed 5,000 homes, businesses, schools and churches. The land’s eastern edge, now part of Downtown West, became parking lots and freeway off-ramps for an unbuilt highway connector, isolating the area and disconnecting the urban fabric for decades.
Following years of underuse, the Taylor family saw an opportunity to revitalize Downtown West through soccer. Major League Soccer awarded an expansion team to St. Louis in August 2019, with the team becoming the first majority-female owned and female led team in MLS. They wanted to create a district that would reconnect the area, drive economic growth and become a year-round destination.
The design by HOK and Snow Kreilich Architects evolved over three years, refining the site’s placement closer to St. Louis Union Station and north of Market Street. The owners publicly unveiled the stadium design in October 2019. The final scheme positioned the stadium, training facility, practice fields, team store and parking garage between 20th and 22nd Streets. A team headquarters, designed by Christner Architects, was later added to the district.
The challenges included navigating a compressed construction timeline during the COVID-19 pandemic. Construction began in March 2020 and Energizer Park opened in November 2022. The stadium now anchors the Gateway Mall, a corridor of public spaces connecting it to the Gateway Arch and the Mississippi River.